All about multiplatform and game development

Another year, another visit at the GamesCom. This year was pretty exciting and there were quite a lot of interesting games and nice developments.

Let's check out some pictures we made. This time we came by car and arrived a bit later due to bad traffic conditions. It was already pretty hot in the morning.

And we got in though the south entrance instead of the main entrance as usual (when you get there by train).

Blizzard had one of the biggest booths like last year. I did not see anything new. Obviously all the existing games were featured: Overwatch, Heroes of the Storm, Hearthstone, World of WarCraft and a bit of Diablo and StarCraft.

Good old Demon Hunter with red outfit, one of my favorite classes in Diablo 3, but together with the mage classes always my favorite to play the weaker fragile ranged classes.

Sun light rays from Crysis I guess, gets better every year :)

We also went to the Cinema, Mafia III gameplay was been shown, very good presentation, probably the best this year. Lots of gameplay and interesting story. Will probably be a good game except for the super-boring driving parts (cars, ships) like in older Mafia games .. and GTA, Sains Row, .. but some games are especially boring and just want to show nice scenery, which becomes outdated a few years later and is just plain boring.

Cosplay guys and gals were also quite prominent, maybe not as much as last year, but there were quite a bunch of cool costumes, like this zombie guy, who took a smoke break.

Final Fantasy 15 seems to be a very boring game, IMO the wost presentation and most dull speakers ..

Oculus showed off the usual stuff, quite a big booth.

This made no sense, a smoke filled room with stroboscopic lights to invoke epilepsy.

Another good costume. One of the funny things you could easily notice is that most cosplayers did not have any weapon or accessories because of the strict security rules imposed on them by the fair. Definately did not make them as scary as before.

The miliary tried to recruit gamers .. not sure how successful that is, but they are on every single GamesCom.

It is getting chilly, time to warm up in this zombie infested area .. of the "Family" hall.

Drive small cars with your phone as the remote, but both tracks did not work when we checked this out .. not a good sign ..

Deadpool, okay movie and comic, funny yes, but way overhyped.

The Retro-Booth was really huge this year. I liked it a lot. Sadly it was the end of the day already and we could not stay there longer.

Hardware Pong implementation, pretty cool, will probably try some simpler games with my Z80 once I finish putting it together (for details check RC2014).

Here I am playing the good old Boulder Dash. The joysticks are as horrible as I remember them, it is just such an inferior input device. Also I probably broke 10 of them in my childhood in the 80ies ..

My wife Kirsten just hacked this KC85/3 and put something dirty in German on the screen .. in and endless loop. I was playing breakout, but the controls were horrible once again and made the whole game unplayable, both with joystick and keyboard, way too fast, maybe something was emulated and the timer was too fast, but those old games are really no fun anymore and they were not as tweaked and user friendly as todays games.

Okay, that's it for this year, we met some nice people and have seen familar faces. Since we did not have anything new to show, we kept the meetings to a minimum and enjoyed the show.

In the next few months we hopefully have more exiting things to show. Till then ..